Radical media, politics and culture.
November 21, 2005 - 6:16pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

Searching for Journalistic Integrity

Charles Sullivan

The Concord naturalist and writer Henry Thoreau had a great disdain for the
news — especially that conveyed in the newspapers of his time. Thoreau
never read a newspaper and he was critical of anyone who did. Thoreau
refused to profane his mind with the muck and slime of the daily news,
especially as it related to commerce. Being a critical thinker, Thoreau was
deeply suspicious of anything that appeared in the newspapers. Thoreau gave
us the literary masterpieces Walden, Civil Disobedience and fourteen volumes
of superlative journals. Civil Disobedience has inspired political movements
around the world. Both Martin Luther King and Gandhi were inspired to action
by Thoreau’s powerful political essays. There were many others.

November 21, 2005 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

Solve et Coagula writes:

"American Resistance, The Time Has Arrived"

Ted Lang

The time has arrived – a designation must be assigned to the increasing number of Americans who are fed up and terrified by the unbelievable and staggering criminal acts perpetrated both domestically and internationally by the Bush gang. Bush and his GOP are targeting and immediately attacking any and all inspirations of accurate journalistic reporting of administration wrongdoing, proving all the more how despotic American government has become.


Only days ago, the Washington Post broke the story of secret prisons abroad, and what was the reaction on Capitol Hill? Republican Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, was angered not by the illegal activity and the disgrace it brings upon America, but offered instead: "My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security – period. That is a legitimate concern." If this isn’t a clear case of a simpleton shooting the messenger, I don’t know what is!

November 20, 2005 - 1:00pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

November 19, 2005 - 4:34pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

Woodward Joins a Decadent Dance

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times


Whatever impact the scandal surrounding the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity ultimately has on the Bush administration, it continues to spread through the Washington press corps like a toxic plume.


As it does, it discredits not only individual reporters and damages their news organizations but also an entire style of reporting that has come to dominate the way Americans are informed — or misinformed — concerning their government's conduct.


This week's casualty was the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who, as it turns out, has concealed for 17 months the fact that a Bush administration official he still refuses to name to his readers leaked Plame's identity to him before the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby — now under indictment for perjury — named the then-covert agent to New York Times reporter Judy Miller and others.

November 19, 2005 - 4:26pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Monsieur Cokehead

John Chuckman

I confess that while completely disagreeing with the aims of the Parti Québécois I think the party has had some riveting leaders. René Lévesque, the Parti's founder, was a fascinating man, a man whose disarmingly intimate manner of speech rarely failed to spark interest. You could watch him puffing cigarettes and rasping his eloquent words for hours. Later, the party chose Lucien Bouchard, perhaps the most electrifying public speaker Canada has produced. This was a man capable of giving goose bumps to listeners, a fiery intelligence on a mission.


Well, members of the Parti Québécois have just elected a new leader, André Boisclair. He doesn't quite fall into the category of exciting politician, but he is a capable speaker in Canada's two languages, better, certainly, than the party's last leader. He has the saving grace of appearing not to be subject to fits of rubbery facial gymnastics like the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Gilles Duceppe, a man who unfortunately often resembles the valedictorian student at a college for clowns.

November 18, 2005 - 3:32pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Paris, Texas"

Hoipolloi Cassidy

In France all courts are kangaroo, at least potentially. As a rule the system works as well as any other: you're presumed to be guilty until proven innocent, but there are levels of presumption and therefore levels of proof throughout the whole process, from Jean-Pierre who witnesses and interferes to the gendarme who determines and passes you on to inspector Maigret, concerned to get the whole picture, to the investigating magistrate, the courts, the judge, the jury. As a rule there's a some kind of checks and balances, and as usual in France they're more a question of connections and individualism than a strict enforcement of rules. But the system goes wrong when these levels are by-passed: when legal professionals work against the community, not within it; when the inner circles and the political cliques take over; when ruling-class paranoia takes control. And the system's gone wrong in the suburbs of Paris.

November 17, 2005 - 9:35am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

Chomsky Answers Guardian

Noam Chomsky, Z Mag

This is an open letter to a few of the people with whom I had discussed the
Guardian interview of 31 October, on the basis of the electronic version,
which is all that I had seen. Someone has just sent me a copy of the
printed version, and I now understand why friends in England who wrote me
were so outraged.


It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always
keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the
matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it’s worth reviewing what
most readers could not know. The general interest is that the print version
reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and
work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre.
It’s of general interest for that reason alone.


A secondary matter is that it may serve as a word of warning to anyone who
is asked by the Guardian for an interview, and happens to fall slightly to
the critical end of the approved range of opinion of the editors. The
warning is: if you accept the invitation, be cautious, and make sure to have
a tape recorder that is very visibly placed in front of you. That may
inhibit the dedication to deceit, and if not, at least you will have a
record. I should add that in probably thousands of interviews from every
corner of the world and every part of the spectrum for decades, that thought
has never occurred to me before. It does now.

November 17, 2005 - 9:25am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

Two Myths That Keep the World Poor

Vandana Shiva, Ode

From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world
suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end
poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the
world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a
UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book
The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made
it into a cover story.


But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He
simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as
the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he
writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much
of the world was left far behind.”


This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have
been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth
accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich
textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the
genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the
Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or
North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and
markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

November 16, 2005 - 2:32pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Contradiction of Trotsky"

Claude Lefort

"Let us hold out our hands to each other and rally around our Party's committees. We must not forget even for a minute that only the Party committees can worthily lead us, only they will light our way to the Promised Land."

It was in these words, with the turn of phrase now familiar to us all, that as early as 1905 Stalin addressed the Russian workers on the occasion of their first revolution. It may well have been on that very same day, Trotsky notes, that Lenin dispatched from Geneva the following appeal to the masses: 'Make way for the anger and hatred that have accumulated in your hearts throughout the centuries of exploitation, suffering and grief! (1)

Nothing could be more typical of the two men, or better bring out the contrast between them, than these two statements, one made by a revolutionary for whom the oppressed masses are the essential force of history, the other made by a party militant, already a 'bureaucrat', for whom the party apparatus alone knows what the future is to be and is capable of bringing it about. For us who are familiar with the course that events have taken since then, this psychological opposition assumes a more general significance, for it forms part of a broader opposition that is essentially historical in character.

November 16, 2005 - 10:11am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Superpower Vulnerability"

Henry C.K. Liu

[The author notes that "this article was rejected by Asia Times without explanation."]

That the US is now the world’s sole remaining superpower is above challenge. This unchallenged status has affected US approach to formulating foreign and domestic policies in the post-Cold War era. In foreign policy, the US has been operating on the basis that its national values have been validated by triumph in the Cold War and that its resultant sole superpower status now earns it both the moral right and the military means to spread such values over the whole world. Resistance to such self-righteous values is now deemed evil by US moral imperialism, in need of elimination not by persuasion but by force. This new approach has made the world less safe than it was during the Cold War, the end of which briefly entertained a false hope for a new age in which a world with only one superpower could thereafter live without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world has been plunged into successive holy wars of imperialistic moral conquest by the sole remaining superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks onto the US homeland. The impact on domestic policy from terrorist threats has in turn been the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the name of homeland security.

Such holy wars of moral imperialism cannot be blamed entirely on neo-conservatives in the second Bush administration. While the two wars on Iraq were initiated by the two pere et cie Bush administrations that sandwiched eight years of Clinton rule, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars were the handiwork of Clinton administration neo-liberals. The faith-based foreign policy of George W Bush echoes the value-based interests of the foreign policy of Bill Clinton, such as the grandiose aim of enlarging democracy by force around the world and preventing mass starvation and ethnic genocide by spilling more blood.

The US under Clinton sent troops into Bosnia with a host of policy delusions, such as revitalizing an outmoded NATO to perpetuate European security dependence on the US, ending a local war that could spill beyond the borders of Croatia and Serbia, establishing a closer relationship with the Russian military, demonstrating that the US is willing to use its super military power to spread its national values overseas even though the security of the US was not threatened and neutralizing domestic criticism of amorality in a foreign policy based of realpolitik. The wary US military demanded and received clear rules of engagement towards these flamboyant political objectives, allowing soldiers who were attacked, or threatened with attack, field authority to respond with lethal force quickly and massively; exempting the military from having to perform jobs of refugee resettlement, monitoring elections, controlling civilian traffic, supplying food, clothing, fuel or other basic needs to the civilian population; no hard time lines for moving forces into Bosnia, hence allowing the military to enter Bosnia slowly with deliberation and in the safest possible way; committing to a clearly-defined departure date (December 1996) for military forces; limiting the mission to peacekeeping and not peace enforcement and if there were major attacks on the Implementation Force, US forces would withdraw; a solid understanding that “mission creep” would be firmly resisted; provision of the best of the newest equipment to US forces on the ground in the air and on the sea and the State department arrangement for military cooperation from neighboring states, especially Hungary, Albania, Croatia, Serbia. In fact, the military served notice that it was the wrong tool for achieving the administration’s limited-war political objectives. It was a perfectly appropriate position. The US military is arguably the best in the world, best led, best equipped and best trained. But its performance and morale are steadily eroded by assignments to missions that are best handled by non-military means. When a well-oiled machine is use inappropriately, both the machine and the task suffer.

The experience in Bosnia, a nation which existed only in the imagination of US ideologue policymakers, should have served as a clear warning for Kosovo and Iraq. It was Bosnia that “animated our policy towards Kosovo,” Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to Greece, told Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the conservative Cato Institute. Even though the US spent $12 billion and occupied Bosnia for more than three years, Clinton’s arm-twisting Dayton scheme was a policy failure. To this date, nationalist Serbs continue to dominate local politics and refugees are not returning home. There is little home-grown economic growth. The kind of democracy being introduced by the US “more represents Boss Tweed than George Washington” as the US and its NATO allies force Bosnians to live under a government that represents none of them. Internecine local conflicts always have a longevity that exceeds US political attention span.

Bandow testified on March 10, 1999 before the House International Relations Committee Hearing on “The US Role in Kosovo” that the Clinton administration attempted to impose “an artificial settlement in Kosovo with little chance of genuine acceptance by either side.” A US diplomat in Belgrade was reported to have said: "If you're a Serb, hell yes the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] is a terrorist organization." Even moderate ethnic Albanians admit that the KLA had targeted Serb policemen and other government employees, any Serbs viewed as abusing Kosovars, as well as Albanian collaborators. Each cycle of violence spawned more deadly violence. Belgrade understandably accused the US of aiding and abetting terrorists in Kosovo directly but remotely from Washington.

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